You know that feeling when you want to play some music, but you don’t know what? You can shuffle through your music library, but I don’t do that often for two reasons. The first is that my library is made up of disparate types of music, much of it classical. All my classical music is set to not shuffle, so I wouldn’t have any of that come up if I just try shuffling. The second is that I often prefer listening to albums.

So wouldn’t it be great if you could have iTunes pick an album at random and play it for you? Well, iTunes can’t, but Doug Adams has done it. Doug’s Play Random Album AppleScript does just that. It grabs an album from your iTunes library, at random, tosses it in a playlist, and starts playing.

Here’s what I’m listening to now: a disc from the Minimal Piano Collection Volume X-XX box set (Amazon.com, Amazon UK):

When that’s over, unless I have a desire to hear something specific, I’ll run the script again, maybe just once, maybe a few times, until I find something that I wouldn’t have thought of listening to. Because one advantage of using this script is that it can highlight music I haven’t listened to in a while; the last time I listened to this one was late 2012.

To make this even easier to access, I use LaunchBar to control much of what I do from the keyboard. I can access this AppleScript with an abbreviation – I use APR – and run it quickly.

If I don’t like the album that comes up, I just invoke LaunchBar again, and run the script again.

By the way, if you’re a LaunchBar user, the above is a sneak peak at the new LaunchBar interface, which will soon be available in LaunchBar 6, due out this month.